Anonymous Content’s new CEO Darren Walker said the management and production company is developing a feature film on iconic writer James Baldwin that it will produce with the Obamas’ Higher Ground.
It’s commissioned Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James and his partner, James Baldwin scholar Nicholas Boggs, to write a script based on Boggs’ best-selling biography Baldwin: A Love Story, Walker said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in LA, appearing with Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of Emerson Collective, Anonymous Content’s majority owner.
Walker was tapped as chief executive early this year. He was formerly the president of the Ford Foundation, leading its $17 billion endowment.
“Our balance sheet will be increased. Will have an envelope to do [more] … We can, because what happens when you have a long-term investor? You can be courageous if you have conviction and you have an investor who is aligned with that,” he said. The idea is to move away from the “fee-for-hire” production model. “Now Emerson has made it possible for us to become a financier in the market, so we’ll be able to co-finance, finance, take the lead in financing a film. So it won’t be like it has been, where our production team gets a great script and they say we’ve got to go out and find someone to finance this.”
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Jobs, also a major investor in The Atlantic, said Anonymous Content founder Steve Golin had “a beautiful vision” but that people grieved and “entropy set in a bit” after he passed away seven years ago, followed by tough times in the industry with Covid, then Hollywood strikes. But the company is attached to several dozen festival films this season, Emmy wins, and, under television head David Levine, co-produced Zoe Kazan’s upcoming Netflix series East Of Eden as Walker said the independent builds up to “version 3.0”
Jobs, along with former HBO chief Richard Plepler, are joining a reconstituted board under chairman Michael Klein, Walker said. Steve Shikya was named COO in August following the hires of Liza Burnett Fefferman as chief communications and marketing officer and Michael Sinclair as chief legal officer.
Asked about the unconventional choice of Walker to run the company, Jobs said: “People were asking that at the beginning, and within a few months, everyone was saying what a brilliant stroke of genius it was, because he’s electrified Anonymous Content and also created quite buzz across the industry.”